Crime

Criminally Yours: Telling The Truth

Maybe there's an urge in all of us to confess, come clean, get it off our chest, tell the truth. Don't do it.

By  
on

justice-handcuffs-e1372182679824-300x286There’s this myth that goes, “If I tell my lawyer I committed the crime she’s representing me for, she won’t try to help me as much.”

Nothing’s further from the truth. (At least not if you’re a criminal defense attorney worth her salt.) Simply put, I don’t care if my clients committed the crime or not. I’m not looking for the truth. I just want to get them off.

Sound callous?

Well, it’s not. Everybody else — the prosecutor, the cops, the judges, even the court officers — are predisposed to believe the defendant committed the crime. In a system of mandatory sentencing where prosecutors hold all the cards, decide what charges to bring, when to be ready for trial, and whether or not to make a plea offer, the defendant is reviled and the defense counsel has little control.

With the odds so stacked against the accused, defense counsel is the only person standing by his side saying, “I don’t care what you did, I don’t care if you did it, I’m not here to judge you, I’m here only to help.”

And help takes many forms, from getting a better plea deal to going to trial, which includes trying to get the guy off, even if he’s guilty. (Although this doesn’t happen as often as Hollywood would like you to believe, and generally “getting off” means still being found guilty of a crime, just a lesser one, like drug possession — the crime that should have been charged in the first place — instead of drug sale.)

One of the first things I tell my clients is, “I don’t even want to know if you did it. So don’t tell me. It closes doors.”

Sponsored

What I do need to know is what the prosecutor has in his bag of tricks: Who are his witnesses? Is there DNA or other forensics? Can he prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt? Did you speak to the police or prosecutor? Have you made a confession?

Maybe the client is embarrassed to say “yes.” But often, I’m the last to know when my client has spilled his guts either to police during the initial booking, or to friends and family via tape-recorded phone calls from jail. (This, even when they’re alerted that the calls are being recorded.) Why dupe your lawyer and nobody else?

Sure, sometimes confessions are false, but when you tell the mother of your child that you just grabbed somebody’s cellphone on the subway and are now facing seven years in jail, it sounds awfully believable. Just have the courage to tell your lawyer before she’s sandbagged with the admission on the eve of trial.

So here’s my advice if you’re ever arrested or for clients of yours who might be: 1) Keep any type of admissions to yourself. If you feel moved to tell a friend or relative about the crime you’ve been arrested for, do so only in person away from the prying ears of police and phone monitoring systems. 2) Never, ever tell the police you’re guilty. There’s absolutely no benefit. No matter how they make “telling the truth” sound enticing — we’ll give you a break; we’ll let you go home; we’ll find you a drug program; we understand why you did it; we have you on tape doing it — none of what they say can be believed. Their only goal is to get you to confess. It makes their job and the prosecutors’ job a lot easier.

I’m continually astounded at how many people don’t understand this, and how even those with long criminal histories, who should know better, still succumb to the promises of sweet-talking cops. Often, if they’d just kept their mouths shut, they could have been acquitted.

Sponsored

Maybe there’s an urge in all of us to confess, come clean, get it off our chest, tell the truth.

I’m wondering this week about the lawyer who got arrested last week for the stabbing murder of his wife in Scarsdale. He’s a perfect target for cops to sweet talk. I wonder what he admitted, even inadvertently, or if he was smart enough to just say, “I’m not talking. I want a lawyer.”

Toni Messina has been practicing criminal defense law since 1990, although during law school she spent one summer as an intern in a large Boston law firm and realized quickly it wasn’t for her. Prior to attending law school, she worked as a journalist from Rome, Italy, reporting stories of international interest for CBS News and NPR. She keeps sane by balancing her law practice with a family of three children, playing in a BossaNova band, and dancing flamenco. She can be reached at tonimessinalw@gmail.com or tonimessinalaw.com.

Topics

, , , ,